Book Image

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook

By : Rishi Yadav
Book Image

Apache Spark 2.x Cookbook

By: Rishi Yadav

Overview of this book

While Apache Spark 1.x gained a lot of traction and adoption in the early years, Spark 2.x delivers notable improvements in the areas of API, schema awareness, Performance, Structured Streaming, and simplifying building blocks to build better, faster, smarter, and more accessible big data applications. This book uncovers all these features in the form of structured recipes to analyze and mature large and complex sets of data. Starting with installing and configuring Apache Spark with various cluster managers, you will learn to set up development environments. Further on, you will be introduced to working with RDDs, DataFrames and Datasets to operate on schema aware data, and real-time streaming with various sources such as Twitter Stream and Apache Kafka. You will also work through recipes on machine learning, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning & recommendation engines in Spark. Last but not least, the final few chapters delve deeper into the concepts of graph processing using GraphX, securing your implementations, cluster optimization, and troubleshooting.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 3. Spark SQL

Spark SQL is a Spark module for processing structured data. It had a humble start, but now it has become the most important Spark library (as DataFrames/Datasets are replacing RDDs).

This chapter is divided into the following recipes:

  • Understanding the evolution of schema awareness
  • Understanding the Catalyst optimizer
  • Inferring schema using case classes
  • Programmatically specifying the schema
  • Understanding the Parquet format
  • Loading and saving data using the JSON format
  • Loading and saving data from relational databases
  • Loading and saving data from an arbitrary source
  • Understanding joins
  • Analyzing nested structures

We will start with a small journey down memory lane to see how schema awareness has slowly evolved into a Spark framework and has now become the core of it. After this, we will discuss how the Catalyst optimizer, the core engine of Spark, works. In the next two recipes, we will focus on converting data from raw format into DataFrames. Then we will discuss how to seamlessly...